The Contemporary Ceramics exhibit at Stremmel Gallery is a survey of top-notch examples of some functional, some conceptual work that shows how ceramics, even though it โarrivedโ as a fine-art medium long ago, still has a self-conscious streak.
Each piece in the show is impressively creative, experimental or just plain interesting enough to merit its own article. What struck me most is that a good 75 percent of the pieces look like they could have been made from materials other than clay, or at least borrowed techniques and aesthetics from other media.
John Mason, a ceramics-world heavyweight who grew up in Fallon, showed human-sized, architecturally abstract ceramic sculptures that my gallery-going companions were convinced were made of metal. Berkeley artist Robert Bradyโs ceramic tribal masks look like they could be made of wood. Larry Williamsonโs matte black cairns, cast in ceramic from rocks in his Virginia City yard, have the patina, surface marks and weight of apparent cast bronze. The surfaces of Robert Harrisonโs smaller-than-a-breadbox houses resembled enameled metal. Richard Newmanโs lifelike baseball mitt look looks a readymade sculpture, something purchased from a store and placed in a gallery to upend our notions of art makership, but the โleatherโ cord laced through โmetalโ grommets on the worn-in mitt are all made of clay.
I wondered whether making clay sculptures look like other materials had become sort of a game among contemporary ceramicists. And I wondered whether this meant, given the long-running art vs. craft debates, whether ceramicists were trying to transcend their medium, defend it or something else entirely.
I caught up with Robert Brady by phone. He took a breather from biking up a steep slope in the Berkeley Hills to give me his perspective on the matter.
โThe amazing thing about clay is it can be made to look like anything,โ he said. โAnd it has been used to represent the sensation of other materials. That is inherent in the dialogue, image and content in the history of ceramics.โ He mentioned that the tradition of trompe-lโลil in ceramics goes back at least a couple of centuries. (The term refers to imagery thatโs so super-realistic it โfools the eye,โ which is its literal translation.)
He cautioned me against the assumption that his colleagues were trying to replicate wood or metal, though.
I pointed out that his wall pieces in the show looked decidedly like clay, but that they were the same scale as paintings youโd hang in a home or office and that he could have achieved approximately the same look using welded pieces of square metal tubing.
โI could see your position in that itโs kind of constructivist,โ he answered thoughtfully. โItโd be a logical way to work with pre-formed industrial tubing.โ
Brady, who frequently works in wood and had a solo exhibit of wood sculptures at Stremmel recently, mentioned that viewers tell him his wood piecesโ โdry and desert-like surfaces sometimes look like clay.โ He said heโs not trying to make his materials look like something theyโre not.
And while he wouldnโt mind ceramicists being more aware of the prevailing trends in non-ceramic artwork, he sees no point in trying to copy them and heโs comfortable with the fact that โceramicsโ and โcutting-edgeโ donโt often meet.
Bottom line, says Brady: โYou need to find yourself. Thatโs the whole thing.โ
Itโs a tall order to do that in ceramics, with its conceptually weighty history. The Contemporary Ceramics exhibit gives us a great range of examples of how ceramicists are doing that.